Edward Steichen

Edward Steichen, in full Eduard Jean Steichen, (born March 27, 1879, Luxembourg—died March 25, 1973, West Redding, Connecticut, U.S.), American photographer who achieved distinction in a remarkably broad range of roles. In his youth he was perhaps the most talented and inventive photographer among those working to win public acceptance of photography as a fine art. He went on to gain fame as a commercial photographer in the 1920s and ’30s, when he created stylish and convincing portraits of artists and celebrities. He was also a prominent curator, organizing the hugely influential “Family of Man” exhibition in 1955.

Early life and work

Born in Luxembourg, Steichen and his parents immigrated to the United States when he was two years old. They settled in the small city of Hancock, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where Steichen’s father worked in the copper mines. When his father was incapacitated by poor health the family moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where the artist’s mother supported the family as a milliner. Beginning at age 15, Steichen served a four-year apprenticeship in a lithographic firm. During the 1890s he independently studied both painting and photography, applying himself equally, it would seem, to their commercial and fine-art possibilities, as he understood them.

The obvious way to persuade the public that photography was a fine art was to produce photographs that emulated the mood, manner, or attitude of the paintings and prints that the public confidently held to be works of art. Young Steichen pursued this strategy, known as Pictorialism, with abandon. Utilizing his training as a painter, in his early photographs he frequently used the gum-bichromate process in conjunction with platinum or iron-based emulsions, which allowed him a very high degree of control over the image and tended to produce pictures with a superficial resemblance to mezzotints, wash drawings, and other traditional media. Steichen’s photographs were first exhibited in the Second Philadelphia Photographic Salon in 1899, and from that point he became a regular exhibitor, and soon a star, in the shows of photography’s fine-arts movement.

In 1900, before making the first of many extended trips to Europe, Steichen met Alfred Stieglitz, who bought three of the young man’s photographs at the not inconsiderable price of five dollars each. It was the beginning of a close and mutually rewarding relationship that would last until 1917. In 1902 Stieglitz invited Steichen to join him and other photographers, including Clarence H. White and Gertrude Käsebier, in founding the Photo-Secession, an organization dedicated to promoting photography as a fine art.

Steichen became closely involved with many of Stieglitz’s endeavours during the next 15 years. In 1905 Stieglitz opened his first gallery, originally called the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession but better known as 291, named after its address at 291 Fifth Avenue. Steichen served as the gallery’s French connection. Using the contacts he had made in Europe—many of whom he had memorably photographed—he became principally responsible for arranging the exhibitions of French Modernist art that were held at 291, including the work of Auguste Rodin (drawings) in 1908, Henri Matisse in 1908, and Paul Cézanne in 1910. Such shows were often the first presentations in America of the work of these artists. Concurrently, during the 14-year existence of Stieglitz’s Photo-Secessionist magazine, Camera Work, it reproduced more pictures by Steichen—68—than by any other photographer. (Stieglitz himself was second with 51.)

The break between Stieglitz and Steichen came on the verge of the United States’ entry into World War I, perhaps chiefly because Steichen was a dedicated Francophile and Stieglitz was openly sympathetic to Germany. Or perhaps it was because Steichen had come to believe that Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession and its instruments—291 and Camera Work—had become the vehicles for a personality cult. Toward the end of the gallery’s life, Stieglitz sent letters to those who had known the place well asking them to say what 291 had meant to them. The responses were properly and predictably flattering, except for Steichen’s. His was angry and shockingly frank. He wrote, in part, “I resent this inquiry into [the gallery’s] meaning as being impertinent, egoistic and previous. Previous in so far that it makes the inquiry resemble an obituary or an inquest, and because it further tends to establish a precedent in the form of a past.” It is difficult to believe that the friendship could have survived so direct a challenge.

Change of direction

When the United States entered the war in 1917, Steichen volunteered for service and was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Signal Corps; soon he was made head of aerial photography for the American Army in France. His experience with the rigorous technical demands of this work changed his view of the medium, and after the war he replaced the rather vaporous symbolism of his earlier Pictorialist style with optical clarity and greater objectivity of description. Steichen spent several years experimenting with realistic effects of light, tone, and shadow; during this period, he famously photographed a white cup and saucer against a black velvet background more than one thousand times, hoping to achieve a perfect rendering of subtle gradations of white, black, and gray.

In a further reaction to what now seemed to him pious Photo-Secessionist attitudes, Steichen threw himself wholeheartedly into commercial photography, establishing a successful commercial studio when he moved to New York City in 1923. He devoted the next 15 years of his life primarily to fashion photography and celebrity portraiture for Condé Nast publications such as Vogue and Vanity Fair and to advertising photography for the J. Walter Thompson agency. Most notably, as part of his work for Condé Nast, Steichen created striking portraits of figures such as Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo, and Charlie Chaplin that helped to define the era. He closed his very successful studio on January 1, 1938, and spent much of the next four years pursuing his long-time avocation of plant breeding at his home in Connecticut, concentrating on the delphinium in particular.

Curatorial work

One month after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the U.S. Navy made Steichen a lieutenant commander in charge of directing a photographic record of the naval war in the Pacific. In 1946 he compiled a selection of these pictures in the book U.S. Navy War Photographs; Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Harbor. During World War II, Steichen also began his association with the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In 1942 he was guest director of “The Road to Victory,” an exhibition that showed photographs not as independent works of art but as the threads of a tapestry—the subservient parts of a larger whole. The coherence and emotional force of the exhibition was widely admired. Steichen followed this in 1945 with the exhibition “Power in the Pacific.”

In 1947 Steichen was named director of the department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, a position he would hold until his retirement 15 years later. “The Family of Man,” an exhibition he curated in 1955, was arguably the most important work of art in his long career. The exhibition was based on the concept of human solidarity, and Steichen selected 503 images from countless prints submitted from all over the world. It is said that the exhibition was seen by almost nine million people in 37 countries. Steichen went on to curate many smaller exhibitions at the museum, some of which were the first substantial shows of the work of important younger photographers, thus continuing his role as a tireless advocate of the medium throughout the remaining years of his career. His autobiography, A Life in Photography, was published in 1963.